They will never brawl the same way: how Internet have changed anti-fascism.

The respect of one's privacy is considered by most as a political issue which democracy has to deal with, and it is commonly acknowledged that Internet has emphasized with the development of social networks. We put our lives on the web, and our information are accessible more or less simply. The barrier between private and public life becomes more and more blurred as we publicize our lives, and one of their major aspects is our political opinions. Even if lots of users do not reveal their political beliefs, affiliation and votes on the social media, you can say one's political orientation just in browsing their Facebook walls or their retweets. When we speak about privacy on Internet as a political issue, one generally thinks about intrusion by a government. The fact that a government has the power to record our political opinions and activities is largely disapproved by people.

Nevertheless, the government is not the only actor who can intrude our ''privacy'' to look for our opinions. Actually, if you have taken part in any sensible political discussion on Internet, you are more likely to have been watched by activists than by any government. The radical conflict that takes place between anti-fascist and radical right activists is to deeply connected to ethics for them to accept each others opinions. Indeed, each group organize a real hunt to discover the identities of their opponents, and to develop a list of them. If you have talked about race, migrations, homosexuality or abortion on Internet, and especially on a local website (for example a local news media), it is very probable that people went on your profile to check if you are an activist. In the conflict that takes place between anti-fascists and the radical right, there is no room for privacy. However, generally extreme right activist prefer to keep their records to act later while the antifascist prefer to publicize the identity and the convictions of their adversaries.

If you browse a bit on leftist and anarchist websites, you should quickly end up in anti-fascist blogs. On these blogs or websites, anti-fascist activists write lists of extreme right activists, associating their full names and their pictures, sometimes adding some personal information such as their dress, their job etc. On the British website EDL News, there is a list of the far right sex offenders list, where one can find the name, party, description of the crime and sometimes a link to a news article about these people. In lots of countries, websites named ''fascist watch'' or ''nazi watch'' exist. One of the most developed is the French Fafwatch network, which is materialized by regional blogs about the local far-right groups : it is very interesting to see how these websites, which are often blogs hosted by non-commercial websites such as noblog.org, constitute an international networks where every blog recommends the others. There is not one single big website which contain all the articles and index them, but lots of decentralized local blogs, and this can be explained by practical reasons. The antifascists never have a single national organization as they are generally libertarian and refuse the required hierarchy of a big group, so they prefer to organize themselves locally, but also because the censorship of their blogs is regular : better lose momentarily a part of the network than the whole.

2010 Front National candidate and his back tattoo
"Blut und Ehre" was a slogan for the Hitler Youth, pictures were found and revealed on Internet by anti-fascists

What is very interesting is that the activists who create and participate to these websites mostly use the social networks, especially Facebook, to get information. In this way, an article is generally composed of pictures of the actions of a particular activist (it is often pictures of extreme right graffitis), pictures of the individual and its full name, which are most of the time very simply found on their Facebook page. The personal address and phone number are generally found thanks to the domain name of websites, or to company statuses, which are linked to a particular individual. Once again, all this can be found by any skilled activist on the web.

This has become recently more institutionalized before the 2015 departmental elections in France. Indeed, a list was made, where one can find some Front National (the french extreme right party) candidates and some of their quotations found on the social networks. But what is remarkable about this list is that it was not made by the traditional antifascist activists, close to the anarchist movement, but by the french Communist Party, which is nowadays a a kind of radical social democrat party. This had an echo, and some of these candidates were excluded by the Front National because of their words. Once again, what an individual has said on Facebook (or, less often, Twitter) becomes a real responsibility and sticks to its career.

An example of what stands on the list the Communist Party made : Thierry Brésolin, Front National candidate (excluded), Teil county, Ardèche "Marine (leader of the Front National), you are the reincarnation of Hitler. You will clean France we trust you for that''

The recent Facebook confidentiality rules have changed this phenomenon a bit, but it can be quite easily bypassed by the use of fake accounts. The activists have to create a fake identity to introduce the network of their adversaries, and as soon as they have been accepted as Facebook friends they can easily look for information, pictures etc. Prudence and suspicion have always been present and necessary to these radical groups, but the rules have changed. Ten years ago, the main rules were: be cautious when you go to or leave a demonstration, do not wear political signs when walking alone... Today, it is more like: do not accept strangers as friends on Facebook, do not put pictures of your face on Internet, do not use your real name... Bruno Latour considers that new medias do not create anything, they only serve a purpose that people feel the need to achieve. In this way, media are only ''backdrop for human action'', which give opportunities to act. Indeed, the conflict and the fights between fascists and antifascists did not wait for Internet to be a reality, but it is clear that the means they use are very different than they were before.

Fight between Anti-Fascists and the British Union of Fascists, 1936

It is true that nowadays the web is a major tool to promote political ideas and movements, and it appears to be the best place to access information and to discuss freely about sensible subjects, but even if it has to be kept as a neutral and safe space for everybody it cannot be a space of total freedom. Because Internet is the result of a perpetual cooperation, it permits interactions. And when this interaction raises such fundamental ethics issues as discriminations, it becomes a clash with concrete consequences. Antifascists want to prevent the extreme right to spread hate in putting the people responsible in danger while the question of the responsibility of the media itself is quite complicated. As disgusting as Fascism, Neo-Nazism or Holocaust denial are, censorship is practically difficult (which symbols to ban ? how to supervise what the users say?), and it would stand in the way of the creation of a neutral web. In this way, most of the social networks are actually very permissive with the publications of the far right.